March 18, 2024

Sunrise — 7:05, 7:21.

At 1 minute after sunrise time, a thick bank of clouds blocked the sun...

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16 minutes later, the sun made it over those thick clouds and into a distinctive cross shape...

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"If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with, no more appeasement."

Said Ronald Reagan, in 1970, talking about dealing with unrest on college campuses, quoted at the time in "Ronald Reagan Is Giving ‘Em Heck" (NYT)(free access link).
Later he said the remark was a "figure of speech" and that anyone who took it seriously was "neurotic." Within a few days, four students were shot at Kent State.

I ran across that because I'd noticed that the NYT was spelling "bloodbath" as 2 words — "Trump defends his warning of a ‘blood bath for the country" — in its current reporting. I had 2 theories about why:

1. A compound word takes a long time to become standard. When we see "bloodbath" as one word, it feels more like a stock term. Trite. By spacing it out as 2 words, you might get people to think that Trump put it together in his own fervid brain. But maybe...

2. The NYT has a style guide, and it decided long ago that "blood bath" was the correct configuration, and people at the Times are meticulous about writing it the same way every time.

To narrow my 2 ideas about twoness and oneness down to one, I searched the NYT archive for the 1-word form. I found many examples of "bloodbath," including Reagan's crazy idea of sticking it to the students. There was also Russell Baker making jokes about Richard Nixon's "bloodbath" theory of Vietnam (in 1970, deploying a fictional character he called "Dandy"):

"Donald Trump told an appellate court here Monday that he can’t obtain a bond for the full amount of the civil fraud judgment against him — more than $450 million, including interest..."

"... raising the possibility that the state attorney general’s office could begin to seize his assets unless the court agrees to halt the judgment while the former president appeals the verdict. Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that 'ongoing diligent efforts have proven that a bond in the judgment’s full amount is a 'practical impossibility,"' adding that those efforts 'have included approaching about 30 surety companies through 4 separate brokers.'...  Late last month, an appeals court judge denied Trump’s request to pause the enforcement of the judgment for widespread business fraud. A full panel of the New York appeals court — known as the First Department of the Appellate Division — is now considering whether to halt the judgment while Trump pursues his appeal."


Bloodbath.

This is the third post of the morning and, like the previous two, it has a title consisting of one word that's in the news this morning. I can see from the comments in those other posts and in last night's open thread, that people especially want to talk about "bloodbath."

I feel so pushed to talk about "bloodbath" this morning that I balk at churning out a "bloodbath" post. You already know what you want to say. Is it my job to expound on "bloodbath" as it relates to the free-speaking raconteur Donald Trump and his gasping, raging antagonists?

I'll just feed your bloodbathlust with my favorite "bloodbath" quotations from the OED:

Jawbone.

"One day Sampson was walking alone/He looked down on the ground and he saw an old jawbone/He lifted up that jawbone and he swung it over his head/And when he got to moving ten thousand was dead" — Peter, Paul & Mary.

"Oh, Jawbone, when did you first go wrong? Oh, Jawbone, where is it you belong?" — The Band.

From "Moral Suasion" (Wikipedia):
"Jawboning"... is the use of authority to persuade various entities to act in certain ways, which is sometimes underpinned by the implicit threat of future government regulation. In the United States, during the Democratic administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, officials tried to deal with the mounting inflationary pressures by direct government influence or jawboning.... 

From an amicus brief in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, one of 2 free-speech cases up for oral argument in the Supreme Court today:

Bully.

I'm reading "White House’s Efforts to Combat Misinformation Face Supreme Court Test/The justices must distinguish between persuading social media sites to take down posts, which is permitted, and coercing them, which violates the First Amendment."

This is Adam Liptak's piece in the NYT about the case that's up for oral argument in the Supreme Court.
[A 5th Circuit panel] said the [Biden administration] officials had become excessively entangled with the platforms or used threats to spur them to act.... [The administration argues] that the government was entitled to express its views and to try to persuade others to take action.

“A central dimension of presidential power is the use of the office’s bully pulpit to seek to persuade Americans — and American companies — to act in ways that the president believes would advance the public interest,” Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote.

In response, lawyers for the states wrote that the administration had violated the First Amendment. “The bully pulpit,” they wrote, “is not a pulpit to bully.”
As we await today's argument, let's take a moment to consider what the "bully" in "bully pulpit" means. In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt exclaimed: "I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit!" First, clearly, he was using "bully" — as he often did — to mean very good or excellent. And he used the word "pulpit," because he knew he was preaching, that is, proclaiming righteous opinions in public.

Pressuring people behind the scenes is not preaching. You're not in a metaphorical pulpit. You're in the metaphorical backroom. And you're not proclaiming righteous opinions, you're exerting power, intimidating people. It's not "bully" in the sense of excellent.

The OED entry for "bully pulpit" is clear that "bully pulpit" originates with Theodore Roosevelt. It explained "his personal view of the presidency." It is — as the OED puts it — "A public office or position of authority that provides its occupant with the opportunity to speak out and be listened to on any issue." 

We're also told: "In later use sometimes understood as showing bully n.1 II.3a." That meaning of "bully" is:
Originally: a man given to or characterized by riotous, thuggish, and threatening behaviour; one who behaves in a blustering, swaggering, and aggressive manner. Now: a person who habitually seeks to harm, coerce, or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable; a person who engages in bullying.
If "bully pulpit" is sometimes understood that way, it's risky to argue "A central dimension of presidential power is the use of the office’s bully pulpit...."

The riposte was predictable: "The bully pulpit is not a pulpit to bully."

I want to add that what is said behind the scenes is not from the pulpit at all. A pulpit is an elevated and conspicuous platform. One thing about social media posts is that they are out there, in public, and perfectly conspicuous. If the President (or the shadowy people behind him) want to use the"central dimension of presidential power" that is the "bully pulpit," let them step up onto a conspicuous platform and proclaim opinions they intend us to find righteous.

In this case, the opinion that was conveyed behind the scenes was that social media platforms ought to take down posts on various political topics — coronavirus vaccines, claims of election fraud, and Hunter Biden’s laptop — that people wanted to debate. If it's pulpit-worthy, express that opinion outright and clearly to all of us. Don't go behind our back and intimidate the social media giants upon whom we, the little people, depend to slightly amplify our tiny voices.

March 17, 2024

Sunrise — 6:58.

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"A forced sale of TikTok within 180 days, as House-passed legislation requires, would be one of the thorniest and most complicated transactions..."

"... in corporate history, posing financial, technical and geopolitical challenges that experts said could render a sale impractical and increase the likelihood the app will be banned nationwide.... A sale would require severing a company worth potentially $150 billion from its technical backbone while being the subject of legal challenges and resistance from China, which has pledged to block any deal...."

In short, realistically, it's a ban.

"[T]hey agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering."

"Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism...."

Writes Elizabeth Barber in "The Case Against Children/Among the antinatalists" (Harper's). The author wants a baby.

Lots of stories of antinatalists at the link, but what I want to quote is some of the philosophical material:

It's sad to see the NYT framing the fight for freedom of speech as a perverse force.

I'm reading "How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation/Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online" (NYT)(free access link).
Academic researchers wrestled with how to strengthen efforts to monitor false posts. Mr. Trump and his allies embarked instead on a counteroffensive, a coordinated effort to block what they viewed as a dangerous effort to censor conservatives....

Waged in the courts, in Congress and in the seething precincts of the internet, that effort has eviscerated attempts to shield elections from disinformation in the social media era.
It tapped into — and then, critics say, twisted — the fierce debate over free speech and the government’s role in policing content.... Facing legal and political blowback, the Biden administration has largely abandoned moves that might be construed as stifling political speech.... Social media platforms now provide fewer checks against the intentional spread of lies about elections....

Much more at the link, including discussion of the case to be argued tomorrow in the Supreme Court (which "accuses federal officials of colluding with or coercing the platforms to censor content critical of the government"). 

"The 150g tins — enough for a single meal — will cost roughly £1 and contain a chicken dish created without harming a single animal."

"Rather than slaughtering chickens, Meatly’s scientists extract a sample of cells from a chicken’s egg, which are replicated and grown in vats in a process similar to making beer or yoghurt.... Meatly, which is also planning a product for dogs, hopes to appeal to animal lovers’ environmental conscience, with a growing trend for pet owners to feed their animals a vegan diet.... [Owen Ensor, the founder of Meatly], 35, who is vegan, has tasted his firm’s product. 'It tastes like chicken,' he said.... [H]e does not need to worry about texture, which bothers humans much more than animals. 'Pets care what food smells like and they care what it tastes like, and if it has the right nutrients,' he said. 'But they don’t particularly care what it looks like or if it has the right kind of texture.'... [R]eplicating the correct texture from a vat of cells is tricky."

From "Britain’s first lab-grown meat: it’s for cats/Tinned chicken cultivated from cells taken from an egg will be marketed to owners who want to supply a normal diet without the guilt. Its vegan creator explains" (London Times).

With cats in the picture, I'm inclined to read "lab-grown" to involve Labrador retrievers.

How does Ensor know cats don't care about texture? But it's not as though traditional cat food is providing the texture I presume cats love (which is the texture of a freshly killed mouse).

By the way, as a human being with a greatly diminished sense of smell (AKA taste), I am overwhelmingly concerned with the texture of food. Food texture matters!

"A long time ago, I got an email from a troll saying he could draw better than me with his penis."

"The unfortunate effect of these consolidations is that whether or not you can draw well with it, you must be in possession of one."

Said Hilary Price, creator of the comic strip “Rhymes With Orange,” quoted in "Female artists are disappearing from print comics at chain newspapers/Creators are thriving in other mediums. Are print comic strips nearing the end?" (WaPo).

Something I learned from the top-rated comment over there: The Washington Post website offers lots of comic strips, but they're so hard to see: "With an online subscription to WaPo, you have to scroll allllll the way down to see the link for the comics. Then you click each comic title, and there are dozens, to see each individual daily strip." Here's that link.

It's been so long since I've followed any comic strips, I don't know what to click on. I'm sort of (but not really) surprised to see many names that I read when I was a child: Andy Capp, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, Prince Valiant, Mark Trail, Mary Worth. With a webpage, I have the sense not to click on any of them, but if I had a real newspaper with "funny pages," I might read them because they were there.

"'I told them about my inside-out approach to dressing,' she said. She asked each of the women to identify three words..."

"... that describe who they are right now. Or, alternatively: who they might want to be and what they might want people to see when they look at you. Then, when they would go shopping — or go through their closet at home — they would have this list on hand. With each article of clothing they picked up, they had to consider, 'Does this say these three things about me?'... 'The women all came back and were like: "I never had a style. I feel like I have a style, I have a way to know how to get clothes now."' As for the words Slater chose to identify herself at this moment: writer, community worker, grandmother. 'When I wear a denim shirt and overalls, I am all those people,' she said...."

From "Your clothes no longer serve you. Now what? Lyn Slater, the 70-year-old former fashion influencer and author of ‘How to Be Old,’ offers lessons on what to wear for your next act in life" (WaPo).

"I did everything by the book the whole time. They changed the rules, and I should be grandfathered in. I shouldn’t have to abide by them."

Said Tony Cavallaro, quoted in "Authorities Seize Alligator Being Held Illegally in Home Near Buffalo/The alligator, Albert Edward, had been with his owner for 34 years" (NYT).
He was 11 feet long, 750 pounds heavy and 34 years old, and until this week, he lived in a pool house attached to his owner’s home in Hamburg, N.Y., about 13 miles south of Buffalo.

The [New York State Department of Environmental Conservation] said that Albert’s owner, Tony Cavallaro, had a license for the alligator, but it expired in 2021. In an interview, Mr. Cavallaro, 64, said that while visitors to his home did sometimes take pictures with Albert, they never swam with him or rode him. Instead, they would briefly get in the water for a quick photo with the animal, often when he was sleeping, Mr. Cavallaro said.

Cavallaro bought Albert as a newborn and believes "the poor thing loves me."

I'm interested in the law here, the always enticing notion that the law doesn't apply to you. Cavallaro also seems to believe that the law of nature — the dangerousness of alligators — does not apply to Albert.

But what's missing from this article is any mention of the comic strip that was once central to our culture: Pogo. There's an alligator named Albert, and you don't cite Pogo?

ADDED: The Wikipedia article linked above describes Albert Alligator as "An exuberant, dimwitted, irascible, and egotistical alligator."

March 16, 2024

Sunrise — 6:58, 7:02, 7:16.

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"Tonight was wild…. no hard feelings, Extinction Rebellion Crew. Michael is on your side, but Mayor Stockmann is not. Much love."

Wrote Michael Imperioli, quoted in "Michael Imperioli responds to climate protestors who crashed his and Jeremy Strong's Broadway show: 'Wild'/'No hard feelings,' the Emmy winner wrote after helping physically escort one protester from the theater" (Entertainment Weekly).

Mayor Stockmann is Imperioli's character in the play — "An Enemy of the People" — that was disrupted by the climate protesters, Extinction Rebellion Crew.

"Actors were called to leave the stage while the protestors were removed, but many remained in character throughout the disruption, with [Jeremy] Strong and Imperioli reacting to Extinction Rebellion as if the interruption were part of the script...."

Lucid.

I'm reading "Without Senators in Sight, Christine Blasey Ford Retells Her Story/Her lucid memoir, 'One Way Back,' describes life before, during and after she testified that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school" (NYT). Excerpt:
Published more than five years after her 2018 congressional testimony, Blasey Ford’s new memoir, “One Way Back,” is an important entry into the public record — a lucid if belated retort to Senator Chuck Grassley’s 414-page, maddening memo on the investigation — but a prosaic one.

 The book is important, lucid, belated, and prosaic, we're told.

Why should we trust the purchaser of TikTok to keep it going? Remember when NBC bought and then killed Television Without Pity?

Here's the Wikipedia page for Television Without Pity, in case you don't remember that wonderful website.

Here's my post from 2014:

Paul Simon loathes feeling groovy.


I'd seen that clip yesterday, and then this morning, when I was out on my sunrise run, the song came up in a "Daily Mix" Spotify had made for me, which I was listening to shuffled:

March 15, 2024

Sunrise — 7:03.

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"New York prosecutors said Friday that they expect to get an additional 15,000 pages of potential evidence in Donald Trump’s hush money case...."

"[F]ederal prosecutors previously investigated much of the same conduct that became the basis for Bragg’s office to charge Trump last year with violating state laws on business records. Trump is accused of scheming to cover up his payment of hush money in 2016 to hide from the public an alleged sexual liaison years earlier with an adult-film actress. Lawyers for Trump... have accused prosecutors of deliberately withholding reams of such documents until the last minute before the scheduled March 25 trial. In recent days, federal prosecutors turned over more than 100,000 pages of documents...."

WaPo reports.

For one reason or another, every one of these criminal cases against Trump is getting delayed:

"[Michael] Imperioli... shouted at another, 'Go back to drama school!' But [Jeremy] Strong, remaining in character, said, 'Let them speak.'"

From "Climate activists halt Jeremy Strong, Michael Imperioli Broadway play ‘An Enemy of the People’ mid-show" (NY Post).
Because the second half of Henrik Ibsen’s play begins at a raucous town meeting, concerns poisoned water and, in this production, already involves audience participation, many in the theater believed the shouters were a part of the show.

One audience member, Ashley Wolfgang, wrote on X, “You know you’ve seen too much experimental theatre when you immediately assume climate protestors in the middle of ‘Enemy of the People’ is part of it.”

Yeah, I've seen plays where someone sitting in the audience starts talking, seemingly interrupting the actors, and it's part of the show. 

You can see video of the disruption, here, at Reddit.

I usually decline to blog about these protests that leverage art to get attention. I'm blogging this because of the way the actors — 2 actors I greatly respect — rose to the occasion and stayed in character and used their own brute strength to oust the asshole. Michael Imperioli (Christopher from "The Sopranos") is 57 years old. Good for him! He took the lead. Jeremy Strong (Kendall from "Succession") is 45. Look how vulnerable they are to random jerks. Where was security?!

"Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times."

"The condemnation of his critics, up to and including the current President, can sound shrill or simply partisan. The fact checks, while appalling, never stop the demagogue for whom the 'bottomless Pinocchio' was invented... In the next few months, the Biden campaign and its allies plan to spend close to a billion dollars attempting to persuade Americans not to make the historic mistake of electing Trump twice. My thought is a simpler and definitely cheaper one: watch his speeches. Share them widely. Don’t look away."

Writes Susan B. Glasser, in "I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You/The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024" (The New Yorker).

Below is the speech Glasser watched in full. I've watched it. It's a standard Trump rally speech. Is Trump "vituperative"? Why not "fiery" or "feisty" (the words used to describe Biden's loud, angry SOTU)? Is he "rambling" and "unhinged" or a marvel of stamina and spontaneity? But Glasser is convinced — or poses as convinced — that watching the whole 2 hours will persuade voters who might vote for Trump that he's as awful at Trump haters insist he is:

"Judge Says Fani Willis Can Stay on Trump Case, but Only if Former Romantic Partner Leaves."

The NYT reports. 

The ruling by Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton Superior Court cut a middle path between removing Ms. Willis for a conflict of interest, which defense lawyers had sought, and her full vindication, with the judge sharply criticizing her behavior....

Judge McAfee said that no “disqualification of a constitutional officer necessary when a less drastic and sufficiently remedial option is available.”... Either “the District Attorney may choose to step aside, along with the whole of her office” or “Wade can withdraw” allowing the case to proceed without further distraction....

Mr. Trump and his co-defendants could appeal the judge’s ruling, as could Ms. Willis, further delaying the proceedings and leaving the matter unresolved indefinitely. ...

ADDED: Here's the text of the opinion.

"Every right that the government has ever taken away from citizens was removed under the pretense of national security."

"My father's favorite philosopher, Albert Camus, wrote that the welfare of the people is always the alibi of tyrants and it provides further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a clear conscience.... People love TikTok. It's the digital public square. If there are security concerns in the tech backend, let's address them there, but let's never reduce Americans' ability to freely exchange ideas. TikTok has become an avenue for young Americans to grow businesses, to express themselves, and to join the political discourse.... President Biden enjoys censoring and silencing those who dare question him. I know that because I just won a case in the court of appeals on that issue against him. So it's no surprise that he supports banning TikTok. The First Amendment should not be disregarded for any reason...."

Says RFK Jr., on TikTok:

"Every young person deserves to have the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are, and feel safe and supported at school and in their communities."

That's from "Statement from President Joe Biden on Nex Benedict" at the White House website.

A young person committed suicide, and the President has responded. 

I just want to add that if something is a right, you have it. You don't just "deserve to have" it. Your rights may be violated and you may choose not to exercise your rights, but you still have those rights.

Here's the one other post on this blog that's about Nex Benedict, a teenager who got into a fight at school and who many people believed had died as a result of that fight. 

March 14, 2024

At the Controlled Burn Café...


... you can write about whatever you want.

A reason — other than the sunrise — to take a walk in the woods at sunrise.

Golden hour photograph (7:22 a.m. (sunrise time was 7:13)):

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Midday photograph (12:46 p.m.):

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"These attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous and, in many instances, just plain old immoral."

"How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need, to tell women what is in their best interest. We have to be a nation that trusts women."

Too early to call the election?

"Less than two weeks before Donald J. Trump is set to go on trial on criminal charges in Manhattan, the prosecutors who brought the case proposed a delay of up to 30 days..."

"... a startling development in the first prosecution of a former American president. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which accused Mr. Trump of covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, said the delay would give Mr. Trump’s lawyers time to review a new batch of records. The office sought the records more than a year ago, but only recently received them from federal prosecutors, who years ago investigated the hush-money payments at the center of the case...."

"The judge presiding over the classified documents case in Florida denied Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss charges based on unconstitutional vagueness...."

"'Although the Motion raises various arguments warranting serious consideration, the Court ultimately determines, following lengthy oral argument, that resolution of the overall question presented depends too greatly on contested instructional questions about still-fluctuating definitions of statutory terms/phrases as charged,” [Judge Aileen] Cannon wrote. Cannon noted in her denial that the issue of the potential vagueness of the statue would be better brought 'with jury-instruction briefing and/or other appropriate motions' instead of in Trump’s motion to dismiss charges. Cannon has not ruled on Trump’s motion to dismiss based on his argument that he had the authority as president to declare documents as his 'personal' records – or on any of his other motions to dismiss the case."

CNN reports.

"Tara McGovern, a transgender musician who was arrested last fall after protesting a speaker on the University of Iowa campus, was acquitted Wednesday..."

"... of charges that they contended went to the heart of the constitutional right to assemble.... University police claimed the protesters were 'chanting and constantly trying to walk in the street in front of the vehicles … preventing them from driving away,' as a detective wrote in his report.... McGovern, 45, insisted they didn’t break the law during the demonstration against Chloe Cole, the speaker who once identified as transgender and now opposes gender-affirming care for minors.... The charges filed against McGovern included interference with official acts and disorderly conduct obstructing streets, the more serious of the two misdemeanors...."

"You’re not leaning toward anyone? Because...."/"I'm leaning away...."

"In recent months, Mr. Kennedy and his camp have approached at least a half-dozen people... to gauge their interest in serving as his running mate."

"Aside from [Aaron] Rodgers and [Jesse] Ventura, he is said to have spoken with former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky; and Andrew Yang, the former candidate for president and New York mayor, the two people familiar with the discussions said.... All have turned him down, or their conversations have not advanced, except for Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Ventura, the people familiar with the discussions said. If anything could be interpreted as a hint of where Mr. Kennedy might lean, the domain name kennedyrodgers.com was registered last week using a GoDaddy host....

From "Aaron Rodgers and Jesse Ventura Top R.F.K. Jr.’s List for Running Mate/Mr. Kennedy said he had been speaking with the Jets quarterback 'pretty continuously' for the past month" (NYT).

"Selling TikTok to a big tech company such as Google, Meta or Microsoft — after all, who else could afford its estimated price of $84 billion? — would not make U.S. users’ data more secure."

"In fact, it would simply give the tech giant buying it a new trove of information about all of us that the new owner could use to enhance its already astoundingly detailed portraits. Right now, for example, Google has most of my email, my documents, my web-browsing behavior and my search queries. The videos I watch on TikTok are, in fact, among the few things it doesn’t have. Adding those videos would add valuable new data to its dossier on me and allow it to monetize it with advertisers, data brokers and anyone else that uses its self-service online advertising platforms and services."

Writes Julia Angwin, in "TikTok Could Disappear but the Problems It Poses Remain" (NYT).

History-making.

Must everything be declared — in advance — "history"?


What is the history? That anyone is acting out on the notion that an abortion clinic is a good campaign photo op?

"I made a joke and said, ‘We have to quit talking like this. I can barely type through the tears.'"

"She typed back: 'Well, I have Kleenex and margaritas. By Google Maps, you live 34 minutes from here.' 'When she opened the door, I said, "How about a hug for an old friend"... And she hugged me. And I gotta tell you, that hug alone was kind of like putting an electric blanket on high around me.'... They remarried... Why? 'To right an old wrong,' [she said], 'I say this to him over and over again, how incredibly rare it is to have a chance to right a wrong. To have a chance to have a redo is just nothing short of a miracle.'"

From "They Married, Divorced and Then Married Their Ex-Spouses Again/Five couples share how and why they decided to reconcile and tie the knot again" (NYT)(free access link).

From the comments over there: "I have never forgiven our parents for divorcing while we children were teenagers — because years later they got back together again and eventually remarried. They put us kids through a lot, and apparently it was completely unnecessary. It's unfashionable for couples to 'stay together for the sake of the children,' but absent abuse, I wish more would consider it."

"One day I opened my eyes from a deep sleep and looked around for something, anything, familiar. Everywhere I looked was all very strange."

"Little did I know that each new day my life was unavoidably set on a path that would become unimaginably strange and more challenging."

"We’ve seen many people through the end of life. It’s never dramatic, like Snagglepuss..."

"... staggering around onstage clutching his throat. It can be rough, and then one slips over gently to whatever awaits. My old pastor told me it is like going to bed on the living room floor and waking up in your own bed."

Writes Anne Lamott, in "Age is giving me the two best gifts: Softness and illumination" (WaPo).

The pastor's remark calls to mind Percy Shelley's "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats":
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife....
As for Snagglepuss... I'm old enough to get the reference, and I thought it would be easy to find a YouTube clip of the ham-actor lion on stage overdoing a death scene. I began to suspect that YouTube was censoring death. I don't know. I did find this collection of bad actors dying:


ADDED: Maybe Snagglepuss is an up-to-date reference. I see that he was reenvisioned in 2018 by DC Comics as a gay playwright in "The Snagglepuss Chronicles: The Need to Enter Stage Right":

March 13, 2024

Sunrise — 7:12, 7:14.

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"Across most of the battleground states, President Biden’s re-election campaign is trailed by worrisome polling, gripes about a slow ramp-up..."

"... and Democratic calls to show more urgency to the threat posed by former President Donald J. Trump. Then there is Wisconsin. Mr. Biden — who was set to travel to Milwaukee on Wednesday to visit his state campaign headquarters — did not have to rev up a re-election apparatus in Wisconsin. Local Democrats never shut down a vaunted organizing network they built for the 2020 presidential campaign and maintained through the 2022 midterm elections and a 2023 State Supreme Court contest...."

I'm reading "Trailing Trump in Polls, Biden Can Be More Bullish in One Battleground/The president faces lagging energy in many key states. But in Wisconsin, which he will visit on Wednesday, rolling clashes over abortion rights and democracy have kept Democratic voters fired up" (NYT).

Another visit by Biden to the campaign headquarters in Milwaukee. When does he interface with the people? 

"The House overwhelmingly passed a measure Wednesday to force TikTok to split from its parent company or face a national ban, a lightning offensive that materialized abruptly..."

"... after years of unsuccessful negotiations over the platform’s fate. The legislation, approved 352 to 65 with 1 voting present, is a sweeping bipartisan rebuke of the popular video-sharing app — and an attempt to grapple with allegations that its China-based parent, ByteDance, presents national security risks. The House effort gained momentum last week after President Biden said he would sign the bill if Congress passed it.  But its fate now rests in the Senate, where some lawmakers have expressed concern it may run afoul of the Constitution by infringing on millions of Americans’ rights to free expression and by explicitly targeting a business operating in the United States.... Biden and his campaign opponent, former president Donald Trump, have taken conflicting public stances on the matter, with Biden endorsing it and Trump speaking out against the prospect of a ban."

WaPo reports.

Here's a WaPo article from yesterday about "Why Trump is now against a TikTok ban."

"They coerced her into carving their screen names deep into her thigh, drinking from a toilet bowl and beheading a pet hamster..."

"... all as they watched in a video chatroom on the social media platform Discord. The pressure escalated until she faced one final demand: to kill herself on camera. 'You just don’t realize how quickly it can happen,' said the mother, who intervened before her daughter could act on the final demand.... Unlike many 'sextortion' schemes that seek money or increasingly graphic images, these perpetrators are chasing notoriety in a community that glorifies cruelty...."

From "On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm/Vulnerable teens are blackmailed into degrading and violent acts by abusers who then boast about it" (WaPo).

"In a surprise move on Wednesday, a judge in Atlanta quashed six of the charges against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies..."

"... in the sprawling Georgia election interference case, including one related to a call that Mr. Trump made to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state in early January 2021...."

From "Judge Quashes Six Charges in Georgia Election Case Against Trump/The ruling said charges that Donald Trump and allies solicited public officials to break the law were not specific enough; it left the rest of the case intact" (NYT)(free access link).
“These six counts contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission,” Judge McAfee wrote in his ruling. “They do not give the Defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently, as the Defendants could have violated the Constitution and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways.”...

 Read the full text of the judge's order here.

Dinkwads.

"No, not dickwads — although, I hear you — but dinkwads: the acronym for 'dual income, no kids, with a dog,' a designation going viral on a social media site near you.... I am particularly fond of @MattAndOmar jumping for joy in their pants, waving their pooch’s little arms: 'When we remember we’ll be a dinkwad household forever.' Terence and I jump for joy in our pants all the time. And nothing wobbles, because I am a child-free adventuress, taut of thigh and upstanding of breast, and my beloved is a 6ft 4in man-god with all his own hair and a backside as tight as a walnut. He tosses his hair as we dance, and I toss mine, and Pimlico, our media whippet, tosses hers, and we laugh as only child-free lifestyle gurus can laugh — musically, like the tinkling of so many wind chimes...."


The "dinkwads" slang I can absorb, but what's up with that "in their/our pants"?

"It feels like you’re almost handling it badly in an impressive way at this point."

Biden and Trump clinched the nominations last night and Elon Musk posted this video of Joe Rogan more or less endorsing Trump:

Meanwhile, "Neil Young says he's returning to Spotify , 2 years after exit over Joe Rogan."

Old man, look at my life....

March 12, 2024

Sunrise — 7:14, 7:14, 7:15.

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"To make 'thoughtfulness' a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege."

"That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom. The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the liberal fixation on the health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will. This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right...."

Note the suggestion that puberty is nature's sexual assault upon the child. The author doesn't quite say that, but she put the thought into my head. It would prove too much though. We wouldn't ask whether any given children can consent to take puberty blockers; we would ask whether all children should be required to take puberty blockers.

Also in this article is an acronym I'm seeing for the first time: TARL. This is a "trans-agnostic reactionary liberal":

David Sedaris is such a great talk-show guest.

Here he's talking about a children's book he spent about 5 minutes writing:


"Kids — they can be nice and stuff, but I don't think they're that bright.... It can't be that hard."

He says his parents never read to him when he was a child. Mine didn't either. Sedaris's parents put the kids to bed with "2 words: 'Shut up.'"

The book's illustrator is Ian Falconer, famous for the "Olivia" books, who died last year, as Sedaris mentions, in a set up to a remark that only he could make.

Falconer is quoted in his NYT obituary: "If I had to say one thing, it would be to not underestimate your audience. Children will figure things out; it’s what they do best — sorting out the world."

You know who did not underestimate his audience? David Sedaris, when he told that joke about Falconer on the late-night talk show.

The best satire of the Oscars that I've seen.

Below the line, because it's TikTok...

"The judge later tried... to argue that the jury 'implicitly' found Trump liable for rape...."

"The transparency of the pants..."

"... quickly became an online sensation.... 'Whenever I’m nervous public speaking I just pretend people in the audience are wearing Fanatics baseball pants,' another person joked. The problems with M.L.B.’s new uniforms extend beyond the lewd pants. The league signed a 10-year, $1 billion deal with Nike and Fanatics for the design and manufacture of its uniforms in 2020, but it was only this year that the uniforms underwent a considerable redesign, with... revamped fabric..... Daniel Bard, a relief pitcher for the Colorado Rockies, said in a telephone interview that when he first joined the league in 2009, the uniform he was given was the nicest one he had ever worn. 'You could literally get it perfectly tailored to your body.... They were pretty damn near perfect. Not anymore. It’s a different material. It’s not as soft.... They look funny — too small and too curved.... None of the players asked for this....'"

From "See-Through Baseball Pants Have Fans, and Brands, Pointing Fingers/A redesign of M.L.B.’s uniforms has put Fanatics and Nike at the center of a debate about performance versus quality in sportswear" (NYT).

March 11, 2024

Sunrise — 7:10.

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"Where have all the emus gone? We have about a quarter as many as we did two decades ago..."

"... new data shows. Llamas and ostriches plunged even more precipitously. Meanwhile, the bankable animal superstars you grew up Seeing ’N Saying on Fisher Price toys — think chickens, cows, pigs and turkeys — haven’t lost a step. What happened to our loony livestock?..."

Asks Andrew Van Dam, in "The great American llama (and ostrich and emu) collapse" (WaPo).


Did any of you "invest" in wacky animals?


As in any investment strategy shaped like a pyramid, exotic livestock schemes rely not on selling animal products like milk, eggs, wool, meat or leather, but on selling the animals themselves to a new sucker.... [T]he classic mark for these dubious investments probably would have been a couple who had just retired or moved to the country and had a few extra acres burning a hole in their pockets.... During the boom years... every month as cadres of savvy bird brokers would spot new money the instant they walked in and bid up prices accordingly.... More dumb money flowed in as friends and neighbors worried about missing out on the ostrich-and-emu game.... [F]resh rounds of new rural residents [would] convince themselves it made sense to pay $40,000 for an emu....

ADDED: Is it true that the stress was on selling the animals and not on the products that could be made from them? I seem to remember the touting of emu meat. Here, there's this from 1992 in the NYT: "Emus and Ostriches Studied as Future Food":
"There is a huge market for ostrich hides, feathers and meat," said Dr. Kenneth Page, an avian venterinarian who has been working with Georgia's rapidly growing ostrich and emu industry for more than a year. It is $100 million to $200 million-a-year industry.

"The meat is red and it tastes just like steak, but it doesn't have any cholesterol," Dr. Page said. "In California, especially, it is becoming the new yuppie food." Ostrich and emu meat is also higher in protein and lower in fat than beef, he said....

And it wasn't just the seemingly amazing meat:

Ostrich feathers are used in the clothing industry and their hides are used for everything from billfolds to belts. "I like cowboy boots," Dr. Page said, "so I picked up a pair of those darn ostrich boots in October, for $695, and I understand that was a cheap pair."

Oil extracted from the emu, which is slightly smaller than an ostrich, standing close to six feet tall and weighing 110 to 115 pounds, can also be used as a pain reliever, its proponents say. Besides, said Charles F. Powell, the president of the Georgia Emu Association: "It's one of the best moisturizers on the market. When you put it on, it goes right down into your muscles without a greasy film or anything."

But there was still the worrisome news that the business had mostly to do with selling the birds (to suckers?):

[It] is essentially still a breeder's market. Because of the lucrative potential of the birds, nearly all are sold to people eager to raise ostriches or emus for themselves. A pair of mature breeding emus sell for $15,000 to $20,000, while an ostrich couple are close to $50,000....

"In the early days of online life, there were 'flame wars,' performatively absurd and vitriolic debates among the people who posted messages on various bulletin boards."

"These endless arguments prompted efforts to better moderate discussion. The resulting desire, on the part of posters, to depose the moderators, or 'mods,' has been a constant of the Internet’s existence ever since—on Usenet groups, on Reddit, and on every form of social media. Who are the mods? The big ones are establishment institutions that aim to govern and to regulate, to maintain credentials and decorum. The mainstream press, obviously, which includes me and my employer, is a mod, and we are the target of endless ire, often rightly. The academy—particularly its most élite schools, the Harvards and the Yales—is another mod. But the mods have been weakening for some time.... The mods do have supporters: 'normie' liberals and conservatives who still put a degree of faith in the expert and media classes and who want, more than anything, to restore some bright line of truth so that society can continue to function...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Arguing Ourselves to Death/To a degree that we have yet to fully grasp, what rules our age is the ideology of the Internet" (The New Yorker).

The article title "Arguing Ourselves to Death" is a play on the book title, "Amusing Ourselves to Death." The book, by Neil Postman, came out in 1985, and mostly took aim at television.  

The article's subtitle reference to "the ideology of the Internet" is also inspired by "Amusing Ourselves to Death." There's this quote from the book:

"The male body is not a joke" — that was the joke, last night at the Oscars.

I understand the humor — I remember the streaking incident from 50 years ago — and I think John Cena played his part well, but I find the body very weird, so weird that I googled whether he was wearing some sort of nakedness body suit. Is that the male ideal these days? Swollen and devoid of hair? And he couldn't have side-stepped out barefoot? He needed Birkenstocks? 

Note: He was wearing panties.

March 10, 2024

At the Caution Café...

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... you can write about whatever you want.

"In theory, the recent push for racial representation in elite America should have made the establishment more attuned to the concerns of nonwhite voters."

"But in practice, this push tended to treat representation and progressive politics as a package deal, making nonwhites with moderate-to-conservative views more exotic, not less — as mystifying, in a way, as any MAGA-hat-wearing white guy in a rural diner. Again, I’m part of that establishment, and I don’t want to pretend that I have my finger fully on the pulse of, say, blue-collar Hispanics who went for Biden in 2020 but now lean toward Trump.... But the first step to saving Biden’s re-election effort is to acknowledge the need for such an explanation — because unpopularity that you can’t fathom can still throw you out of office."

Ross Douthat is having a hard time explaining "Why It’s Hard to Explain Joe Biden’s Unpopularity" (NYT).

"There’s a part of me that doesn’t have anything to say, and so I try to festoon myself with things I think are interesting."

Said Jeremy Strong, quoted in "Jeremy Strong Isn’t Sure He Knows Who He Is" (NYT).

I put that quote in the post title because it had "festoon" and I'd just written "festoon" yesterday. A lot of people in the comments talked about "festoon," so I infer that you might want to talk about "festoon" again today.

The word began as a noun, and the original "festoon" was a garland of flowers. The etymology is "fest" (feast) plus the ending "-oon" (which is just an ending used way to make a noun). There are many words with "-oon," and I feel that a certain silliness is conveyed: balloon, cartoon, baboon, Brigadoon, doubloon, dragoon, lagoon, lampoon, maroon, harpoon, macaroon, pantaloon, saloon, saskatoon.... not to mention all the spoon and moon words and those outdated racial words quadroon and octoroon.

But the passage in the Jeremy Strong interview that I really wanted to highlight is this discussion of something in the book  "Diaries, 1898-1902," by Alma Mahler Werfel:

"People want to regain their agency, their sense of control, and do something to match their fears to their actions."

Said Chris Ellis, a U.S. Army colonel who researches the prepper movement, quoted in "US 'prepper' culture diversifies amid fear of disaster and political unrest" (Reuters).
Researchers say the number of preppers has doubled in size to about 20 million since 2017. Much of that growth is from minorities and people considered left-of-center politically, whose sense of insecurity was heightened by Donald Trump's 2016 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, more frequent extreme weather and the 2020 racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd.... 

"It can’t be. It can not be! If he is, he wins the election. You won’t be on this show anymore. He’ll come looking for me. You know, there’ll be things that happen that none of us can imagine...."

Said Robert De Niro, quoted in "Robert De Niro Goes Off on ‘Total Monster’ Trump and His Fans In Epic Rant on Bill Maher — Calls Him Every Name In The Book" (Mediaite).

Ironically, De Niro's rhetoric is quite similar to Trump's — predicting a decline that no one can imagine. We won't have a country anymore! 

"But I think that the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates."

"The word negotiate is a courageous word. When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate."

Said Pope Francis, quoted in "Pope says Ukraine should have 'courage of the white flag' of negotiations" (Reuters).

"Snippets of speeches, impersonations, and other organic content involving Trump routinely rack up tens of millions of views on TikTok."

"Prominent MAGA figures, conservative comedians and other cultural commentators with large followings are highly active on TikTok, which has become one of the top sources of news for Gen Z.
The Nelk Boys, for example — hosts of a podcast Trump has appeared on twice — boast a staggering 4.6 million followers on TikTok...."

From "Inside Trump's TikTok flip-flop" (Axios)(looking into why Trump isn't against TikTok anymore).

"Saturday Night Live" satirizes Katie Britt and — wow! — it's Scarlett Johansson.

I don't know what the satire is, but the blast of feminine beauty is thrilling:


Katie Britt has become a larger-than-life icon.

Anyway. What is the satire here? "Republicans wanted me to appeal to women voters, and women love kitchens." And of course, it's funny to watch an excellent actress playing the role of a bad actress.

AND: What are some other examples of an excellent actor playing the role of a bad actor?

ALSO: I wondered how SNL would do this well since everyone was already reacting to the original as something that seemed like SNL, including me, the morning after the SOTU:


It's the old conundrum: How do you satirize something that is already self-satirizing? Is pre-self-satirizing possibly a good strategy? Could it explain Trump? Does it get at what makes a person choose the demeanor of a clown? Who can mock me when I am already perfectly ridiculous?

March 9, 2024

Sunrise — 6:14.

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"In his oddly charmed political life, Trump has benefited mightily from what political scientist Brian Klaas calls the 'banality of crazy'..."

"...as the body politic has grown increasingly numb to Trump’s fire hose of malice.... It must feel almost providential to Trump that his rise to power has also coincided with the downfall of much of the traditional fact-based media, as well as the emergence of just the sort of alternative-reality information silos that he needed to shape his narrative and platform his bluster, bombast and fakery. So now, despite (waves hand) all this, Trump is about to clinch the GOP nomination for the third time, and most national polls show him leading President Biden.... Has anyone ever been this lucky?"

Writes Charles Sykes, in "Donald Trump, the luckiest politician who ever lived" (WaPo).

You could just as well ask has anyone ever been this unlucky. Trump's antagonists have come at him so many times. That's why he's had so many opportunities to be lucky. Who would want all the trouble that's come his way? 

"Residents who dare leave their homes stumble across bodies that have been left where they fell."

"Port-au-Prince reached a high of 92 degrees on Friday. The smell of decaying corpses, human rights activists say, has driven some people from their homes.... One morgue director said he has received 20 calls in the past week from residents asking him to pick up bodies. Four calls came in on Friday, Lyonel Milfort said. He has refused all of them. With gangs barricading the streets, Milfort said, venturing out has been impossible.... 'What I’m witnessing today is unprecedented. It’s been too long,' he said. 'It’s heartbreaking to go around and see bodies being eaten by dogs and see the corpses covered with sheets.'..."

From "Haitians shot dead in street and there’s no one to take the corpses away" (WaPo).

"Under a policy called 'Slant' (Sit up, Lean forward, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head and Track the speaker), the students, aged 11 and 12, were barred from looking away."

"When a digital bell beeped (traditional clocks are 'not precise enough,' the principal said) the students walked quickly and silently to the cafeteria in a single line. There they yelled a poem — 'Ozymandias,' by Percy Bysshe Shelley — in unison, then ate for 13 minutes as they discussed that day’s mandatory lunch topic: how to survive a superintelligent killer snail.... Leon, 13, said that initially he did not want to go to the school, 'but now I am thankful I went because otherwise I wouldn’t be as smart as I am now.'..."

From "'You Can Hear a Pin Drop': The Rise of Super Strict Schools in England/Inspired by the academic success of schools like the Michaela secondary school in northwest London, some principals are introducing tight controls on students’ behavior" (NYT). 

***

Re "Ozymandias": Here's the full text of the poem, here's the relevant episode of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast," and here's the recitation the poem in one of my favorite movies, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" (the scene is a traveling theatrical production in the Old West):

"We don’t have a candidate. And it’s possible in the end we won’t find a suitable candidate."

"All of the prominent candidates approached by No Labels have refused. That’s because it’s clear that their ticket is a road to nowhere. No serious person wants to end up in the single digits nationally while helping Trump win.”

Said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the Democratic-centrist group Third Way, quoted in "Leaked Audio Shows No Labels Has Zero Idea If It’ll Find a Candidate/There was a lot of palaver about how courageous and patriotic they all are. But if you listened closely, there were also admissions that the way forward is very murky" (The New Republic)("Third Way, along with a coalition of other groups, has warned for months that a No Labels ticket would be most likely to siphon votes away from President Biden...").

"Former President Donald Trump on Thursday signaled his opposition to a TikTok ban being considered in Congress, arguing that it would help Facebook..."

"’If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,' Trump, 77, claimed in a Truth Social post, apparently referring to Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 'I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!' he added."

The NY Post reports.

"The National Guard are our neighbors; these are moms and dads from our communities....They are just there as a deterrent to those who might think..."

".... that they can get away with committing crimes.... This is not heavy-handed.... It is nowhere near what ‘stop and search’ was — a policy I did not support. This is just for a temporary basis to calm things down and let people know they’re safe."

Said Governor Hochul, quoted in "Hochul defends deploying National Guard in NYC subways after 'war zone' backlash" (NY Post).

"Angela Chao, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s billionaire sister-in-law, spent her last minutes alive frantically calling her friends for help as her Tesla slowly sank in a pond..."

"... on a remote Texas ranch, according to a report.... Chao invited several of her girlfriends from Harvard Business School to spend the weekend on a gorgeous, sprawling 900-acre private property in Texas’ Hill Country.... While making a K-turn, she put the car in reverse instead of drive, she told them. While going backwards, the car went over an embankment and into a pond — and was sinking fast.... Blanco County emergency units finally arrived at 12:28 a.m. — a full 24 minutes after they received the call.... One responder described the Tesla as completely submerged. Sheriff’s deputies even stood on top of it during the rescue efforts, trying to bust open a window.... A tow truck arrived to pull the car out of the pond but it didn’t have a cable long enough to reach the vehicle.... A longer cable was finally retrieved. At least one tow truck driver, however, said he was afraid of being electrocuted by the electric vehicle...."

The NY Post reports.

Do electric cars threaten electrocution when submerged? If Chao had been able to get out of the car, would she have been electrocuted? And why was the window so hard to break? Was there a special problem with Tesla, where there's no way to open the door if the electronics fail? Did Chao believe help was on the way and decide to remain in the car? 

"At least 'some' football fans, who attended January's bitterly cold Kansas City Chiefs playoff game, suffered extreme frostbite and eventually needed amputations...."

From "Some attendees of frigid Chiefs game forced into amputations following severe frostbite, Kansas City hospital says /The Jan. 13 wildcard victory over the Miami Dolphins might have come at a terrible price for some spectators who endured sub-zero cold" (NBC News).

"It was the fourth coldest football game in NFL history with the famed"Ice Bowl" of Dec. 31 1967 still serving at the frozen gridiron standard."

"It is theoretically possible, I suppose, that an 81-year-old teetotaling Catholic has suddenly embarked upon a drug-fueled lifestyle."

"But this raises the question of why, exactly, we should care that Biden is using these wonder drugs to elevate his public performance. After all, in sports, we limit steroid use and other performance-enhancing drugs because those drugs have awful side effects, and give those willing to accept them an unfair advantage. What are the side effects of Biden’s alleged drug use?... Or is the idea that Biden is somehow rigging the election by using some kind of drugs that turn him into an energetic public speaker?"

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "Biden Was So Good, Trump Is Accusing Him of Performance-Enhancing Drugs/We need a president who can get high on life?" (NY Magazine).

1. All Trump did was post, at one point during the SOTU, "THE DRUGS ARE WEARING OFF."

2. I suspect Chait knows a lot that he's not saying about how many Washingtonians use drugs. Instead of making analogies to sports and jokes about accusations of rigging elections, why not give us more information about Washington drug culture? I see that a few days ago, Rolling Stone came out with "Trump’s White House Was 'Awash in Speed' — and Xanax/Under Trump, the White House Medical Unit was 'like the Wild West,' and staffers had easy access to powerful stimulants and sedatives, sources tell Rolling Stone." How awash in speed is Washington? I'd like to know. Don't play innocent.

3. What's with Chait's subtitle? "We need a president who can get high on life?"

How to try to achieve racial diversity without trying to achieve racial diversity.

The NYT tried to find out.
 

Here's a free link to the extensive article, elaborately festooned with interactive graphics.

March 8, 2024

Sunrise — 6:43.

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100% cloud cover, but at least I got out before the rain came.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"The UK’s first transgender national news anchor has reported 'Harry Potter' author JK Rowling to the police for 'misgendering' her as a 'man' on social media."

"India Willoughby, 58, reported having 'contacted Northumbria Constabulary' over a series of X posts Sunday by the outspoken author. Rowling, also 58, called Willoughby 'just a man reveling in his misogynistic performance of what he thinks "woman" means: narcissistic, shallow and exhibitionist.'... 'I’m legally a woman, she knows I’m a woman, and she calls me a man. It’s a protected characteristic and that is a breach of both the Equalities Act and the Gender Recognition Act...' Willoughby wrote."

The New York Post reports.

"After I did Steve Bannon's War Room, so many listeners asked me for a link they could send to friends or family members who they argue with about politics."

"That's working-class America: People are in community with folks they disagree with. Polarization is an elite phenomenon."

Tweets Batya Ungar-Sargon, who's a fantastic speaker, succinct and impassioned. She's on the left, by her own report, but she's saying what Democrats don't want to have to hear about themselves (that they do not represent the working class, and Trump does):

 

"Donald J. Trump on Friday posted a nearly $92 million bond in a defamation case he recently lost to the writer E. Jean Carroll..."

"... a move that will allow him to appeal the verdict without having to pay Ms. Carroll.... In a separate case, Mr. Trump faces a judgment of more than $450 million levied by a New York State judge in a civil fraud lawsuit brought by Attorney General Letitia James.... Unless [the intermediate appellate court] panel cuts him a break, Mr. Trump will need to post a bond for the full amount by March 25. If he fails, Ms. James is expected to move swiftly to collect, seizing his bank accounts and potentially even some of his New York properties...."

"There were no gyms open... and so every day, I swam miles aimlessly in the lake. I'd put on a wet suit..."

"... and I'd jump in the boat dock and I'd swim down, by Johnny Cash's house, and I came back, and I did the same route every single day. Because... I knew that I had to if I wanted to continue this breakout season I was having my sophomore year into my junior year. Right? And the amount of snakes that I swam by and, like, dead catfish that are floating on top of the water that, like, hit you in your face while you're swimming is not pleasant...."

Said Riley Gaines, describing the difficulty of training during the Covid lockdown. That's part of a 2-and-a-half-hour discussion with Joe Rogan, which is mostly about her staunch opposition to allowing transgender women to compete against biologically female athletes. I've listened to the whole thing, and I think Joe is boldly risking his reputation with this material. He's very supportive of Gaines, and the two of them frequently declare that the world has gone crazy:

"Saudi Arabia's First Male Robot Touches Female Reporter, Sparks Outrage."

Headline at NDTV.
During its introduction at DeepFest, Muhammad, the first bilingual male Saudi Arabia-made humanoid robot, declared, "I am Muhammad, the first Saudi robot in the form of a man. I was manufactured and developed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a national project to demonstrate our achievements in the field of artificial intelligence."
This isn't just a case of special Saudi Arabian standards of keeping men and women apart. The Muhammad robot grabs her by the buttock:

It's like "Saturday Night Live." Hard to believe I'm not watching a comic actor.


I think that may be how young people talk these days. I think it's learned from TikTok! It doesn't sound natural to me, but it may be the new reality as young people spend so much time watching videos. It may be contagious — like creaky voice and Valley Girl uptalk.

"In perfect sync with his much-hyped generation, Keith... adored the Monkees more than the Beatles and was briefly a Jesus freak...."

"Haring may have out-Warholed Warhol, a mentor and collaborator, in enjoying celebrity friends.... But he was less cool than hot, eager and earnest: handing out free buttons and selling cheap merch at his prescient Pop Shop but fretting about his place in the canon and firing off indignant letters to editors. Time magazine’s influential critic Robert Hughes emerges here as a particular Joker to his Batman, likening Haring and his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat to 'those two what’s their names on "Miami Vice"' and calling them 'Keith Boring' and 'Jean-Michel Basketcase.' (Good lord!)..."


Why I didn't watch the State of the Union address live last night and why I probably will never watch the recording of it.


I didn't watch it live for the same reason I didn't watch "Dragnet" when it was on at 9 p.m. on Thursdays in 1954. It was past my bedtime. I was 3. 

I'm 73 — 8 years younger than Biden — and I'm in the Central Time Zone. He gave that speech at age 81 at 10 p.m. at night and went on until midnight, and I see he was feisty....
I wasn't feisty. I was lying down in my sleep position — a complicated arrangement involving 4 down pillows — and planning to more or less listen, listen until I entered the world of dreams — a place not necessarily more pleasant that the House chamber (last night I woke up screaming at nonexistent crocodiles) — but a place where I sojourn for 7 hours rebuilding the strength of a body that naturally rises at 4 a.m., maybe 3.

As I say, I am 73. I am not feisty at 9 at night and certainly not at midnight. If something were important enough though — stand here in front of millions and read this teleprompter in a dramatic, masterful style — I'd do it properly. I wouldn't yell irascibly. You wouldn't have to shoot me with drugs. In fact, that would be dangerously risky. I might behave erratically. I might yell irascibly. Yell irascibly for 2 hours? What would people think? Is the press on my side? Give me the drugs then! The press is on my side! They'll say I was "feisty."

Calling an old person "feisty" is like calling an African American person "articulate"....


We know what you mean. You're revealing that you have a stereotype and you're giving this person credit for setting himself apart from it.

But I was embracing the old-person stereotype, embracing my pillows, drifting off to sleep, and not really appreciating the irascible tone of voice. But I got to sleep. I've slept through the night. I did not wake up screaming. I'm well rested and perfectly lucid — I think! — composing these remarks before setting out to commune with the sunrise. 

I knew I would have the video of the full speech. What's so special about watching it live? Looking up what was on TV on Thursday at 9 in 1954 — so I could write "Dragnet" in the first sentence of this post — I happened upon this:
Despite hit filmed programs such as I Love Lucy, both William S. Paley of CBS and David Sarnoff of NBC were said to be determined to keep most programming on their networks live. Filmed programs were said to be inferior to the spontaneous nature of live television.

Take away the magic of live television, and what is the State of the Union address? We are perfectly free to watch the entire thing on YouTube the next day. Or never. Or in sliced out snippets — a highlight reel or a collection of verbal slips or biggest applause lines. Or we can just read about it. Did anything happen? Did some grieving mother hear her daughter's name said aloud? Was the name precisely correctly pronounced? Did the President hold up a button? Did he recharge his campaign?

Was he feisty? 

***

"Feisty," the OED tells us, is based on the familiar word "fist." It's a punch-in-the-nose concept. Fisty. Definition: "Aggressive, excitable, touchy." We're told it's American slang, originally dialect, and the OED has the quotes to prove it:

1913 Feisty means when a feller's allers wigglin' about, wantin' ever'body to see him, like a kid when the preacher comes. H. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders 94

1926 That-there feisty bay mare jumped straight upwards and broke the tongue outen the plow. E. M. Roberts, Time of Man 152 

1965 Luther gets a little feisty after a few drinks, and he began to argue with him. ‘D. Shannon’, Death-bringers (1966) xiii. 162

1968 He couldn't shake her loose—she hung on to his arm, feisty as a terrier. J. Potts, Trash Stealer xiii. 148

***

Post-sunrise opinion: The morning after, it is possible to see that the SOTU was a campaign speech. Every morning, there was a campaign speech yesterday.

In the comments: I'm getting a lot of pushback on the etymology of "feisty." It's not the fist that is the hand in an aggressive clench? It's a dog, you say? Well, let's go back to the OED. I see I made an assumption. What I was seeing at the OED entry "feisty" was:

I had not clicked on the boldface "fist." But if I had, I would not have gone to the entry for the kind of "fist" that is the clenched hand. I'd have gone to a separate entry, with 3 things together: a fart, a puffball fungus, and a dog:
1. A breaking wind, a foul smell, stink. Obsolete....

2. The fungus usually known as puff-ball.... Obsolete....

3. U.S. dialect. A small dog....

The etymology pointed us to #3, so — no matter how much we might enjoy thinking "feisty" means farty — we must accept that the comparison is to a small dog. Yappy, hopping around, over-excited. Still farty though. You see the connection. It's always the dog.